


Limited Edition

by englishable



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-13
Updated: 2015-06-13
Packaged: 2018-04-04 06:37:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4128463
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishable/pseuds/englishable
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The new line of action figures is rather weird, but not all that surprising to him. What does surprise Bruce, however, is that it’s an incomplete set.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Limited Edition

**Author's Note:**

> This incredibly silly thing owes its existence to the scene in Age of Ultron where Thor and Steve are seen passing around a Captain America action figure, together with Mark Ruffalo’s extremely valid question about why we can’t have more Black Widow merchandise.

…

Natasha sets a box down on the desk between them, leans forward on both elbows, and waits.

“Open it,” she says. A sharp, sidelong mischief lights her expression from below. “And don’t try telling me you’ll save it for later. I’ve gotta see your face when you find out what it is.”

Bruce dog-ears a page in the book he’s reading, the margins of which are already half-filled with compressed, skirmishing notes, and leans forward as well. Their reflections move closer together in the desk’s darkened glass surface.

The box is about five inches high by four inches wide, wrapped tidily in what looks like the remains of a paper shopping bag. She’s even taped a green bow to the top, with a stick-on label that reads “TO BRUCE/THE BIG GUY” in purple permanent marker. 

He picks it up, gingerly, with the very tips of his fingers, and can hear something clunk against the box’s sides as he gives it an experimental shake.

“…I could trust you to tell me if it was another guinea pig, right?”

“That was mostly Stark’s idea. I’ll keep pleading the fifth on my own involvement.” At this cue, a wheel begins to squeak behind them. Natasha glances over at a spacious cage by the windowsill, and the crested guinea pig it contains. “Tesla’s not talking, either.”  

They stand together in an old filing room – although he sits and she leans, really – that has been made over into an office, lined on three walls with shelves full of binders and books and folders so thick they must be held together by rubber bands. 

She’s been knocking on his door for three weeks now, which makes it about eight weeks or so since she changed addresses to Stark Tower and occupied the living quarters two floors above his.

_(“Knock knock! Sorry to drop in, but have you eaten dinner yet? I need somebody to help me finish this carry-out Thai food, so I thought…”_

_“Say, Stark told me you wanted an article on radiogenic isotopes translated from Russian. Is that right? You’d be on your own with all the other jargon, but I can…”_

_“Hey, Bruce, did you ever watch the Twilight Zone? Because I got this boxset half-off at Walmart, I can lend it to you if you….”_

_“Wait, your full name is Robert Bruce, right? As in Robert the Bruce? The Scottish king? Oh, he was…”_

_“Bruce, listen, I was wondering…”)_

Which also means it’s been two weeks since he first started leaving his office door unlocked, ajar, just wide enough for Natasha to lean her head through whenever she’s passing by.

(A matter of professionalism and general politeness, of course. Bruce doesn’t take any of it personally.)

Natasha props her chin up with one hand and raises an eyebrow. “So?”

“What’s the special occasion?” He teases at a corner of the paper, but realizes that this is a childish action and withdraws both hands into his lap. “It’s not your way of telling me I’ve forgotten somebody’s birthday, is it?”

“Shush.” She swats the comment away. “You’re the special occasion, obviously.”

“Ah. Well, at least it’s not hired entertainment. My roommates did that to me back in college.” He turns the small box around, observing its inverted reflection in the glass. “Unless there’s been a sudden breakthrough in the manipulation of subatomic composition nobody’s told me about.”

“You’d be more interested in the latter than the former, I assume. Although I’ve always thought shrink rays seemed too much along the mad scientist route to really interest you.”

“What, you don’t think the term ‘mad scientist’ belongs anywhere in my job description?” 

Natasha brings the hand over her mouth to hide what might be a smirk, which leaves a single bright smear of lipstick on the backs of her fingers.

“Quit stalling.” 

He glances back and forth between her and the wrapped – well, it’s a present, he supposes, he should think of it as such – the wrapped present again.

She wears sneakers and a pair of denim jeans. A large canvas tote bag, made from a pattern that features ladybugs and daisies, hangs off one shoulder. There’s a compartment at the bag’s bottom, he knows, in which she normally carries a Glock 26, because she doesn’t like it jostling around alongside her groceries.

Apparently.

When she doesn’t move, or say anything else, Bruce lifts two edges of the paper and opens the gift without making a single tear in its wrapping. The sides of it fall away in segments like the head of a tulip.

He stops. 

He’s looking at an action figure version of himself.

(Or the Other Guy, to be more precise. Every reflexive pronoun, true to its name, is something of a two-way mirror for Bruce, although he can never be sure which side he’s on.)

He tips his glasses down from their perch on his forehead to examine the box further.  

Through the plastic front window he can see they’ve gotten the proportions about right, shoulder-to-waist ration and arm-to-torso length and so forth, although the green they’ve chosen is the loud, buzzing color of chlorophyll chewing gum.

And the expression – he’s not sure what to make of that, either. Grim, furious, pugnacious, but somehow determined at the same time, and overall suggestive of more sentience than he can – subject pronouns are a hazard, too – rightfully be credited with. On the back is a regulation warning label about choking hazards for children three years of age and under.

“It’s, ah. It’s different.” He lifts the glasses again. “Where’d you find it? I haven’t asked you that already, have I?”

Natasha straightens up at the same time he does, correcting the distance between them.

“The toy store over on 57th Street, if you can believe it. I had to haggle with their manager before he’d let me buy the whole set. He told me these were the last they’d have in stock until Monday, at least until I threatened him with a right of publicity lawsuit –  but apparently Stark signed all the rights over and conveniently forgot to tell us, so that’s not happening. Here’s the rest.”

She ducks down into the oversized bag and comes out with both arms full. Tony, Steve, Clint, and Thor are dropped onto the desk next, all of them reproduced in perfect, miniature detail and enclosed in several layers of anti-theft packaging.

Well, not all of them.

A folding knife appears from somewhere – it was clipped to the waist of her jeans, hidden at the small of her back – as Natasha cuts the other packages open.

And now it is Bruce’s turn to wait, but Natasha simply stands there fiddling with the Iron Man suit’s movable parts and lets the empty bag drop between her feet.

“Do you think their heads are interchangeable?” she asks. She fits a replica of Steve’s vibranium shield onto the figurine’s arm, pushes a button that pops it forward like a tiddlywinks piece. “I’m sure they’d see the humor in that, eventually.”

Bruce looks up and down the line of emptied packages once more and decides she’s not going to mention it. 

Well, then. 

“Where’s yours?” 

“Oh.” Her expression never falters, but she sets the action figures aside and goes to work picking up the mess of sliced cardboard. “It’s not in the line-up. I don’t know how big the market is for female action figures anyway.”

He looks down at his box again (there’s another joke, now,  _his_  box), mostly so that he will not have to look up at her: or so that she does not have to feel him looking at her, does not feel as though she is being watched for a reaction. Something like that.  

“That seems – exclusionary,” he says. 

Her voice retains the off-handed tone. She fits a new plastic trash bag inside the wastepaper basket.

“It’s not that surprising.” The last of the metal ties is swept up. “Even if there was a demand for it, I can’t exactly claim to be a role model.”

And then the next statement is out, before Bruce has time to declare it unnecessary and obvious and therefore better left unsaid:

“Yes, saving the world seems like a terrible example to set.”

Natasha stuffs everything down into the trash, crushing in the sharp cardboard edges to make it all fit. “You saved it too, remember.”

”Not twice, I didn’t.”

She bends down, one smooth, jointless motion, and lifts that ridiculous bag with the new action figures inside of it. 

“That second time was more the larger Washington metropolitan area than the whole world. Let’s not go padding my resume.”

“Hundreds of thousands of people would’ve died without you. Including me, I’ve heard.” 

“If we’re being technical, I could remind you that the Tetrodotoxine B serum you developed also helped save Fury’s life.” She gives the desk a kind of consoling pat. It leaves behind a set of cloudy-pale fingerprints, as well as a smudge of the lipstick from her hand. “So you had your part in that one, too.”

“Were you this edifying with the manager?”

(He’s angry, naturally. It is an affront to his colleague. It is a tactless, thoughtless slight. He can acknowledge that part without much difficulty: but this anger is safe, purposeful. There’s a logic and a surface tension to it that holds him in place. 

So that is where he stays.)

“No, I only explain things to people I like.” 

Now she is backing away towards the door. A section of her hair flames red in unshaded sunlight from the office window, and Bruce is reminded of the newspaper headlines that had appeared in the weeks and months following SHIELD’s collapse. 

He had kept clear of them – it is none of his business, after all – until they started coming up on primetime news.

_(“Threats Both Foreign and Domestic: Is Black Widow the Hero We Need, or the One We Deserve?” “Shadows in Our Midst: Exposing SHIELD’s Darkest Secrets.” “Choice, Chance, or Circumstance? Experts Weigh in on the KGB’s Infamous ‘Black Widow’ Program.”_   _Along Came a Spider: Romanoff’s Black Widow Credited With Serbsky Hospital Fire, Drakov Family Assassination.” )_

“Okay. You guys have fun.” Natasha waves at him. “I’ll see you later.”

Then she shuts the door, and over the echoing thud of its closing Bruce cannot hear the footsteps as she goes. A wheel keeps squeaking in the corner. 

And he watches her fingerprints slowly disappear, fading around their edges there on the dark polished glass, but in another thirty seconds those are gone too. The red smear of lipstick, however, is not.

He sits back to think.

…

“Dual metallocene-catalyzed polypropylene.”

Natasha stares: whether at him or at the thing in his hand, Bruce can’t tell.  

And maybe that wasn’t the best line to lead with, but now he’s standing in front of her – with a drafting table between them, this time, but at least it’s something – and it’s too late to reconsider. 

As usual.

“…Ty govoríš’ po-anglíjski?” she asks. 

She has a colored pencil tucked behind one ear. Both hands press a piece of heavy cardstock paper flat, which displays in sketched outline something that looks like a modified capacitor for those electroshock bracelets she wears. One of them sits unassumingly on the table beside to her, gutted of its wires. 

Just in case, Bruce takes a half-step back.

“Dual metallocene-catalyzed polypropylene. It’s a type of new generation plastic.” He clears his throat. “A professor at Tel Aviv University developed it several years ago as a potential alternative to steel.  The catalyst creates a more orderly polymer chain to give it higher strength and durability.”

He offers her the plastic figure he’s holding – humanoid in shape, even if it doesn’t resemble anyone just yet, save for the faintest indication of short hair– and she accepts it with suspicious hesitation. Natasha brings the roughly-shaped thing up close, whacks it against her palm and hears the sound when it connects. 

“In case you need to beat somebody over the head with it, you mean?”

“I sincerely hope you’re never in a situation where a plastic toy is your best option as a weapon, Agent Romanoff.”

She shrugs. “Stranger things’ve happened.” 

Bruce shoves a hand into his pockets so that he will resist the temptation to run it through his hair. The other hand grips a stapled packet of paper. 

“They’ve considered using it in automobiles and water distribution systems, but we’re waiting on whether or not the catalyst could work with a biodegradable polyanhydride before we get too excited. It would lower energy and manufacturing costs per unit, in any case.”

“Is it being used in mass production yet?”

“No, I wrote Professor Kol for permission to use this sample – we met once after a conference he gave at Culver. Tony may want it for a lighter-weight suit, though, if it holds up in testing.”

Natasha pauses, which pulls the wire of tension tighter between them, and then she holds the toy figure out to him.

“Bruce, is this supposed to be me?”

“It’s only a prototype.” 

“For a toy, though. It’s me.”

“Yes.”

“Why the super-grade plastic, then?”

“Well, we can say it’s a metaphor.” He offers her the packet of papers next. “And, uh, there’s this, too. In case you wanted to take a look at it.”

She accepts it, runs a thumb across the front page. The papers tick by beneath her eyes, which Bruce cannot read.

“It’s a petition. And before you ask, no, I had nothing to do with it.” He holds up both hands, as though the gesture will somehow make this situation less peculiar. “I found it on the Internet. One hundred and fifty thousand signatures supporting the addition of a Black Widow action figure to the current buyer options.”

(He’s gone through the petition and its user comments twice, glancing over the search terms such as  _“capable female role models”_  and  _“strong, brave women characters.”_   His pen has also underscored the quote, in particular,  _“My eight-year-old daughter was devastated to discover that her favorite Avenger was not included in the new toy line.”_ )

The pages fall back into place when she stops turning them.

“…I did sign it, though. So I can either use these findings to make a persuasively angry phone call, or we can go into private production for an overall superior product. It’s your choice.” Then he adds, lamely, as a postscript, “If you’re interested, that is.”

Natasha doesn’t say anything. 

She is still staring at him. She is still standing there, as she always does, in a way that suggests she is pushed slightly up onto her toes, balanced between one decision and the next. Her silences all have a certain momentum to them, a traveling and hidden energy, like the middle steel spheres of a swinging Newton’s cradle. 

It creates a good, temporary breathing space, he’s found, so Bruce does just that: though it comes out as more of a sigh. 

Because he’s made a mistake, of course. 

He’s forgotten who - but not what, she’s not a  _what_  - Natasha is. He’s misjudged the distance between being professionally helpful and overbearing, committed some irrevocable violation of her privacy and consent. He’s finally managed to drive her off, and he hasn’t even done it on purpose this time around.

_(”…No, we could use a little worse.”)_

“Sorry. I know this is really weird.” He grimaces. “I should’ve asked before I went ahead. I just thought it was important - you know, squeaky wheel gets the grease and all that.”

Natasha laughs. 

It is an earnest, half-startled laugh that takes away her speech, leaves her with one hand clapped to the flat space below her throat. 

And then she reaches forward across the table - her hand opens next into a gesture that has been growing progressively familiar, its fingers outspread - to ruffle his hair.

“Doctor Banner,” she says, and there is a restriction in her voice that he pretends not to hear, because that’s none of his business, either, “you are without a doubt the most magnificent geek I’ve ever met.”

“Weren’t geeks those the circus sideshow performers who bit the heads off live chickens?”

“Nerd, then. Dork. Take your pick.”

He reaches up to smooth the hair flat, but thinks better of it in a moment. “Thanks.”

“Ah-ha. But he doesn’t deny it.”

(Natasha asks to keep the prototype, although it is unpainted and unshaped and unfinished in form. 

_“No, that’s perfect,”_  she explains.  _“That’s the way I want it.”_ )

…


End file.
